NDP leader Adrian Dix in his Vancouver office.

Photograph by: Ward Perrin
, PROVINCE

VICTORIA - When the invitation arrived at the Opposition offices for Adrian Dix to attend this year’s convention of the B.C. Nurses’ Union, it presented the New Democratic Party leader with a bit of a dilemma.

The would-be premier has taken most opportunities to talk to business groups over the past two years and with major trade union gatherings, he’s either gone himself or sent a high-profile representative.

The nurses have often been on the same side of health care concerns as the New Democrats. For instance, recently both blasted the B.C. Liberals for neglecting to fund a promised 2,000 additional nursing positions in their three-year budget and fiscal plan.

But all that was secondary to one overreaching concern for the New Democrats, namely that the BCNU was an outcast in the provincial labour movement.

The union had successfully persuaded nurses in the rival Hospital Employees’ Union to switch their membership in a vote conducted under the provisions of the labour code. Now it was trying to recruit nurse-members of other public sector unions as well.

Though legal and democratic, within the church of labour, where picket lines are sacrosanct and solidarity forever is a hymn, raiding is regarded as original sin, making the nurses the closest thing to heretics.

Dix was not willing to address a union that had been condemned by both the B.C. Federation of Labour and the Canadian Labour Congress. Nor were the New Democrats prepared to send another MLA to speak in place of the leader.

So when some 400 delegates representing 40,000 nurses (including the 7,200 licensed practical nurses who voted to come over from the HEU) gathered in Vancouver last week, the Opposition was a no-show in any official capacity.

Health Minister Margaret MacDiarmid did attend and was rewarded with multiple ovations. Among other things, the delegates hailed her government’s tabling of a piece of legislation that would further the process of consolidating nurses into one big union, albeit without any prior consultation with the other affected unions.

But Dix decided not to attend the nurses’ convention well before the Liberals made that hasty legislative move, and he did so strictly because of BCNU poaching on the membership of unions.

“The raid is ongoing, and we were concerned about that,” he told me Monday when I asked about his decision to boycott the BCNU convention. Why concerned? “Well, there is a concern about the disruptions that it brings.”

He assured me that if the New Democrats win the election, they would seek to establish a businesslike relationship with the nurses’ union, which is not to say that he’d ever be on speaking terms with the delegates at their convention.

Nor could Dix claim that he was simply trying to remain neutral in the nurses’ recruitment drive.

For he did accept an invitation to address the HEU convention in Vancouver late last year and there, to a couple of standing ovations, called on members to support the NDP and help “bring the change we need in B.C.”

In return, Dix embraced the union’s opposition to contracting out of jobs in health care facilities, which has resulted in the layoff of union members and their replacement by contract employees.

Citing the pending layoffs at a residential care facility in Burnaby, Dix said: “Some of those employees have been there 30 years and more ... I don’t know about you, but I don’t think we should let that stand.”

He vowed to restore hospital employees’ successorship rights, legislated out of existence by the Liberals during their first year in office.

Dix is closely tied to the HEU. Judy Darcy, the union’s formidable president, backed his leadership bid, then stepped down to become a candidate in New Westminster, one of the safest seats for New Democrats. If Dix forms government, she’ll likely be on the short list for a cabinet position.

But even as he delivered those crowd-pleasing messages to the HEU delegates last November, the Opposition leader insisted he was not simply telling the audience what it wanted to hear.

“When I went to the Vancouver Board of Trade, I didn’t shy away from issues of taxation, and here I didn’t shy away from the need to work with business,” he told reporter Rod Mickleburgh of the Globe and Mail.

Dix went on to argue that it was more challenging for him to address an NDP-friendly crowd, because the delegates, being supporters, have higher expectations about what could be accomplished in a first term of NDP government.

“There are some things we want to do, but which we won’t be able to afford in the first four years of our mandate ... and I’m giving people the straight goods.”

Doubtless, some of his supporters will be disappointed by the expected-to-be-modest pickings of the party platform, scheduled for release early next month.

But his decision to join organized labour in shunning the nurses’ union also suggests why labour militants and other hard-line NDP supporters are inclined to be patient with Adrian Dix.

Thinking he’s one of them, they expect that in the long run and on the issues that really count, he’ll be on their side.

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